I'd be interested to see benchmarks showing that spinlocks with CAS have similar throughput to a ringbuffer with atomic increment.

Note that with the ringbuffer approach, each reader can process many slots at once, since you're taking the minimum of all published slot numbers. If you last processed slot 3, and the minimum publish count is 9, you can process slot 4 through 9 without doing any atomic operations at all. The design guarantees safety with no extra work.

It's not a minor trick; it's one of the main reasons throughput is orders of magnitude higher.

Benchmarks: https://github.com/LMAX-Exchange/disruptor/wiki/Performance-...

Beyond that, the ringbuffer approach also solves the problem you'll always run into: if you use a queue, you have to decide the max size of the queue. It's very hard to use all available resources without allocating too much and swapping to disk, which murders performance. Real systems with queues have memory usage patterns that tend to fluctuate by tens of GB, whereas a fixed-size ringbuffer avoids the problem.